He has the smile of someone who think he's a hero while having child sex slaves in his basement.
Chagrin Falls. "Your lying eyes" (Tom the Dancing Bug)
Permalink to artist page: https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2025/01/31
Interesting photo. Looks like a forced smile at church in between beating the wife at home.
Yes, that's what I mean. What you described happened and it's a core part of how capitalists build up a popular base. The temporarily embarrassed ones are looking up to the ones who are actual millionaires. Don't worry, they get that money back in the end.
With wealth, like properties, shares and various "passive income", the class interests of the former working class person tend to turn into capitalist class interests: lower taxation, more deregulation, more personal and family wealth accumulation, more welfare and aid for "business owners", smaller social welfare systems (for the masses) with private (and exclusively expensive) alternatives, and so on.
From the horse owner's mouth: How FDR Saved Capitalism
This is where the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" (or billionaire) come into play. That's the most relevant form of being a class traitor.
Deregulation Watch
We have set up Deregulation Watch to help civil society monitor new developments in the deregulation agenda, assess what’s at stake, and organise in defense of strong social, environmental and human rights protections.
>Corporate Europe Observatory has set up Deregulation Watch to help civil society monitor new developments in the deregulation agenda, assess what’s at stake, and organise in defense of strong social, environmental and human rights protections.
On a related note:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom
A search engine that I've been trying to use more: https://stract.com/
Specifically, the conservative/fascist sphere has figured out, via brute testing, how to refine their "narative" stories and marketing of those stories, alongside with how to use social media for it (personalized messaging and astroturfing). They know how to hack the masses or at least the relevant electorate.
What happens when system problems conflict with your personal action/inaction/"lifestyle"?
Because if you're not prepared for change and instead are dreaming of a high-carbon lifestyle, you are probably going to vote for cryptofascists who promise more growth, the "American Dream" of car dependent suburbia as cheap affordable, cheap huge screens, cheap meat, cheap eggs, cheap cheese, cheap private commuting, cheap road infrastructure, cheap parking, cheap office space, cheap flights, cheap tourism, cheap low efficiency devices, and so on, while you get into conspiracies about 15 minute cities, plant-based diets (plus insect protein), and others.
Indeed, the carbon footprint calculator itself was developed in 2004 by a public relations firm working for BP. The tool encouraged individuals to calculate their personal impact on the environment, focusing on activities like driving, energy use, and diet.
The carbon footprint existed before that calculator tool was created as a practical measure in the scientific literature. You can usually find it as "GHG emissions per capita".
The same goes for the ecological footprint and its calculators. These weren't invented by fossil fuel corporations, they were used by them for PR.
The message from the Fossil PR isn't that you're guilty, it's that they own you because you are dependent on their product.
What I'm saying is that people need to be ready to end the addiction, to go through the withdrawal. That's a kind of bravery that isn't fostered by consumerism with its convenience obsession. Otherwise, people will just vote out anyone who tries to do something about the systemic problems, and vote in the liars who deny climate change and other systemic problems.
Can someone point me to an antifascist community to crosspost to? I don't want to fill [email protected] with lesser articles.
Believe them when they tell you. Trump’s camps are coming
Donald Trump targeting of immigrants is a clear sign that America will have concentration camps for extra-judicial imprisoning of immigrants.
>Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting immigrants are a sign that America may soon have what amounts to a system of concentration camps for extra-judicial imprisoning of immigrants. It’s part of the plan.
>The only Democrat who seems to understand all this and who is willing to call it out is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has previously used the c-word to describe Trump’s camps, and yesterday in Congress, she explained how the Laken Riley Act will create what amounts to a system of concentration camps for extra-judicial imprisoning of immigrants.
>In this bill, if a person is so much as accused of a crime if someone wants to point a finger and accuse someone of shoplifting, they will be rounded up and put into a private detention camp and signed and sent out for deportation without a day in court,” she said. “So when a private prison camp opens in your town and they say we didn’t know this was going to happen, know that they did, and they voted for it.”
>None of this is accidental: it is the way such regimes operate, and we have very clear historical precedents. We need to get this through our heads.
>All of those declarations and constitutions and values and human rights we thought were chiselled in stone were, in fact, written on tissue paper, and Trump is dropping them onto a bonfire.
...
>And at the heart of all authoritarianism is the creation of an enemy, the demonisation of some other, or others, onto whom the “good citizens” can project their fears and concerns. When Trump and Vance warn of immigrants eating cats and dogs, they are participating in this age-old ritual of demonisation, and as I’ve said, this is not just a media strategy.
>Hitler certainly made no secret of his antisemitism, and as far back as 1921, an article in the Nazi daily newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, mentioned the idea of a future Nazi government using camps to deal with their enemies. But as Nicholas Wachsmann cautions, “The improvisation after the capture of power makes abundantly clear that there was no blueprint in Nazi files. When Hitler took charge of Germany in 1933, the Nazi concentration camp still had to be invented.”
An article by Tim Dunlop. Audio version is available on the page.
Of course, there was plenty of inspiration to invent concentration camps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_colony
He'd probably love to host the Hunger Games.
TV host 'Dr. Phil' films as ICE targets migrants in Chicago
> - 'Dr. Phil' embeds with ICE in Chicago > - Trump administration deputizes DOJ agencies for immigration enforcement > - ICE makes arrests in Arizona, Puerto Rico
TV host 'Dr. Phil' films as ICE targets migrants in Chicago
> - 'Dr. Phil' embeds with ICE in Chicago > - Trump administration deputizes DOJ agencies for immigration enforcement > - ICE makes arrests in Arizona, Puerto Rico
>Phil McGraw, known as "Dr. Phil" for the eponymous American television series focused on mental health, followed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and other federal agents during the action, according to his X account and two sources familiar with the matter.
We can expect Trump to continue to exploit religion and pander to his base of white evangelicals.
After millennia as a carbon deep-freezer for the planet, regional hotspots and increasingly frequent wildfires in the northern latitudes have nearly canceled out that critical storage capacity in the permafrost region, according to a study published in Nature Climate Change.
For context:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/tech-bro-male-billionaire-anti-democratic/679267/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/03/facebook-meta-silicon-valley-politics/677168/
https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/
The billionaire has described his grandfather as a risk-taking adventurer. A closer read of history reveals something much darker.
>Into that maelstrom came a renowned scientist and engineer named Howard Scott. With a doctorate from the University of Berlin, he’d commanded complex projects around the globe, including British munitions plants and industrial projects for U.S. Steel. Scott and a small group of fellow engineers and scientists had made a diagnosis of civilization’s ills and a prescription for relief. The current capitalist system, they said, was irrevocably broken, and—as one magazine summarizing the movement put it—“we are faced with the threat of national bankruptcy and perhaps general chaos within eighteen months.” Scott described the solution in the language of an engineer—a civilization “operated on a thermo-dynamically balanced load.”
A new study from the George Washington University shows that frozen ground is sinking at an alarming rate across high-latitude and high-altitude cold regions of the Arctic.
